Tag: Neal Cassady

AG : “A Valediction..(Forbidding Mourning)” (by John Donne) (page two-thirty-nine). That was like… here you find a..the acme of Donne in his use of images from cartography, compasses and spheres, and.. and I think that, like, is nowadays you have heavy-metal comix, or (William) Burroughs‘ poetry which has a lot of space-age imagery (android space-age martian heavy-metal). So, in those days, because of the adventures in America reported back, there’s a lot of.. everybody was hung up on the sort of apocalyptic imagery of a New World, and sailing, and making maps. There’s a … Read More

March 21, in case you didn’t know it, has been officially declared by the UN (by UNESCO) “World Poetry Day”Fanny Wallendorf‘s wonderful translations into the French of Neal Cassady‘s Letters (“Un truc tres beau qui contient tout”) (“It’s a beautiful thing, with everything in it”) – (the title, taken from Neal’s 1948 letter to his pal, Bill Tomson) have just been (just this past month) published.
See here and here. ( note – texte en francais)
We should point out that the book only covers the years 1944-1950 (a second, concluding, volume is due … Read More

Pat Thomas‘ interview with Allen, published in 1984, in a little magazine he edited himself called “the Notebook”, out of Rochester, New York, deserves an unearthing and a dissemination. Rock n roll Allen. The piece was headed “Allen Ginsberg Speaks on The Clash, King Crimson, Kerouac, The Grateful Dead”.

One Hundred Thousand Poets For Change, Michael Rothenberg & Terri Carrion’s extraordinarily ambitious annual global manifestation of poetic solidarity and commitment to cultural transformation, initiated in 2011, takes place again – tomorrow!
Numerous events are planned, world-wide. For further information see here, here, and here.
Among them, as the organizers point out, at least fifteen different events in the San Francisco Bay Area alone (including this one):

Word just reaches us of the death of Carolyn Cassady.Brian Hassett has the report here.
She died peacefully, with her son, John Allen, there, in attendance, close beside her. “She was her regular rockin self”, he (Hassett) reports, “up through Sunday, woke up with a tummy ache Monday morning, had an infected appendix and checked out by Friday”…”She was 90 years old and still drank her white wine and smoked her More menthol ciggies every day. That is to say – she was living the life she chose, on her own terms, in her … Read More

1973 Salem State College’s Jack Kerouac Festival – here and here. (We’ve even previously featured an “out-take” here),. Here’s another one, (similarly focusing on the poignancy and tragedy of late Jack Kerouac (and on late Neal Cassady). An audience member asks about Cassady and his legendary cross-country drive, Allen responds.

[This particular tape begins in media res with Peter Orlovsky, having just finished his presentation, and a (more-than-usually) offensive/provocative/drunken Gregory Corso, meditating/theorizing.. on sudden death! – but then, thirty-five seconds in, is the question, and fifty-five seconds in, Allen’s answer]